A New Way To Travel

As part of our sale this Sunday March the 11th we have a number of lots of Russian interest, including lot 497 which is a great piece of aviation history. This travel poster by Anna Cherednichenko (1917-2006) captures the spirit of the age and shows the leisure travel of Soviet Russia the west is often unaware of.

The poster is an advertisement for Aeroflot, the flag carrier airline for the Russian Federation today and for Soviet Russia in the past. Aeroflot is among the oldest airlines in the world having been started in 1923 and was during the Soviet era the world’s largest airline. The poster from 1958 is from an interesting time in aviation history as jet powered planes, as shown here, were relatively new for commercial airlines, and Aeroflot was leading the way in this new technology.

The artist, Anna Cherednichenko, was born in 1917 at the very beginning of the Bolshevik revolution and was a young child during the formative years of Soviet Russia. She went on to graduate from the Surikov Academy in Moscow and was a Member of the Union of Artists from 1950. She specialised in landscape and portraiture, so this gouache on paper is not typical of her work, but it is a great picture of a time when Russia was leading the way in leisure air travel by jet aircraft.